After a smooth launch this Monday, January 8, the American probe Peregrine saw the Moon slip away. Following a failure of the propulsion system, the machine will never reach its objective, confirmed the private American company leading the project.
Launched Monday morning, January 8 aboard the brand new Vulcan launcher which was making its maiden flight, Peregrine seemed on track to become the first private mission to land on the Moon. Carrying with it five scientific instruments on behalf of NASA, the mission also took on board other objects of various natures such as the time capsule from the company Astroscale as well as a bitcoin and human ashes from the company Elysium Space. If all the lights were green until early Monday afternoon, the company Astrobotics which built the lander finally announced in a tweet that the launch had not gone as planned, seriously compromising the chances success of the mission and forcing the teams to improvise a plan B.
This ultimately yielded nothing, as confirmed during the day by the company Astrobotics in a message published on the social network X, formerly Twitter. Due to a fuel “leak,” “there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the Moon,” Astrobotic wrote in this press release. However, the machine still had to operate for several hours in space to collect data for future missions.
After a smooth takeoff at 8:18 a.m. French time on Monday January 8 from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida, the Peregrine lander separated from the rocket to begin its journey towards the Moon. The device then had to orient its solar panels towards the Sun in order to charge its batteries and produce maximum energy. However, an anomaly has occurred, preventing the device from positioning itself correctly. The Astrobotics press release referred to “a propulsion system failure.” A few hours later, a “critical loss of fuel” was detected in turn, seriously jeopardizing the space mission.
The American company then clarified during the night from Monday to Tuesday that the machine had around forty hours of fuel. Once this reserve is exhausted, the machine will no longer be able to keep its solar panels pointed towards the Sun and its batteries will discharge. The time the company has before the device is completely lost is therefore being used to “bring Peregrine as close to the Moon as possible”, reports a press release from Astrobotics which also sent a first photo from space captured by the machine. If the Moon now seems out of reach of the device, the Astrobotics teams are now working to collect as much scientific data as possible and develop an alternative mission so that the work done so far is not in vain.
The success of this mission would have been a real turning point for the United States since it was not only the first landing of an American aircraft on the lunar surface in 50 years but also the first moon landing carried out by a private company. . Indeed, to optimize its costs, NASA now contracts with private companies to transport equipment to the Moon as part of their CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program. After Astrobotics and its Peregrine spacecraft, it will be the turn of the Nova-C lander from the Intuitive Machines 1 mission to launch towards the Moon in mid-February. Nova-C could therefore ultimately become the first private lander to land on our natural satellite.
